Tutorial: 5+ easy steps to turn your slide lessons into animation

On responses from teachers we receive within recent weeks, that switching too fast to ‘schooling on screens’ without preparing beforehand leaves the only direct teaching materials – slide – becomes the only fragile and boring ‘weapon’. Having some animation to aid, can be no better solution right now, for both teachers and students.

‘Good things take time’, truthfully, to the most ideal context, hiring professional animators, those who have eaten and slept along the job to animate your lesson into the most captivating version would perfectly save time and produce an over imaginable solution. Notwithstanding, if you barely have enough conditions to facilitate this right now (can’t wait for more), so don’t wait, you can be your own expert taking advantage of abundant available free resources from animation vendors. It only takes you less than an hour to animate your slide.

The toon generated software I’m going to use in this instruction are designed for everyone, even an amateur with null understanding about motions and animations, as long as you yearn for a more effective presentation for distance teaching/ video conference based. *Remember you have to sign up first as the only cost to utilize those free tools and resources! It’s fast and what you receive is massive, so hesitate not!

Step 1. Prepare a nicer slide

It’s vital to take a realistic look at the current teaching material of your. Good animation is unable to build on a poor visual/content base. Most commonly, a slide is considered good enough if matching readability and content related. But to turn your slide to animations, you need more than that, follow this simple checklist for quick assessment:

📌Do your slides have a good layout?

It’s good if it has a consistent alignment, combining predictable and unpredictable (on purpose) arrangement. Striking a dimensional balance between spacing, padding over text/visual components.

📌 Do your slides have a good hierarchy to identify between headings and paragraphs?

If not, make it very different enough by combining Big and Small, Italic and Straight, Bold and Thin and Sans and Sans Serif font. Typography works robustly here. It’s essential for the learners to visually recognize what’s important and what’s less. Make the important stand out, add another color to more highlight facts and numbers in a consistent voice.

📌 Are your slides concrete enough?

You want your learners to remember everything by putting a lot of information to the slide. Unfortunately, the outcome would not be unproductive tô the way you want it to be. To your learners, it’s just a wordy chaos. Just keep very core information and less highlighting as possible will bring out the best comprehension. I advise you to turn raw databases into beautiful mind maps, icons, charts, images, contrasting examples and analogies, which empowers much to the memory of the learners. The less ‘greedy’, the better it seems.

📌 Styles?

It’s easy to know if your style is good enough.

Color: Check your slide’s palette, decide what’s the primary color to use as a theme, including dark and light variants. Use a secondary color to distinguish information, of course, it’s optional. Set a background, could be light/ dark, and ensure the text can be clearly read on that color.

Theme: Your presentation should be synchronized with properly one voice, one theme, and very consistent.

If your slide does not meet one of the above criteria and you don’t know how to customize, you should quickly look for one to alternate.

Option 1: Find a replacement among the online free templates

It’s advisable to go for Sildego, a Free Google Slides and PowerPoint templates to boost your presentations, and other online sources rather than applying limited PowerPoint templates sought at the default library (which appear abound. So, choose a suitable from various presentation themes on Slidego, and place your content and customize as hard as you can to match the checklist before put it into a ‘motion’ machine to animate in Step 2.

Option 2: Otherwise use templates from the free toon-makers (which is less variable)

Or you can skip this step and mainly go to the next there are available templates from the animation suppliers, for unpaid users, it’s a limited choice, but if you want templates 3D – 2D, you can go straight. I’d like to advise you at least get a free white board animation here for your animation.

Step 2. Get animated with Free Tools

Why do I go with a free tool you may ask? As a pro animator, I often do the animation by adding effects with Adobe After Effects and combining visual, motions, sound, voice-over and different video segments/ components with Adobe Premiere or Camtasia (with vector-based animation). You may like to know my day here. But this process is uneasy for beginners, it’s quite impossible at the first time on the ground that it’s skill needy and software-aquantaint, I suggest you seek an instant tool to help you out speedy.

Clarifying the ‘demo’ content

Recently in my quarantine time, I read a very interesting book on tidying up written by a tidying up master – Kondo Maries (KonMari, in short). Japanese has a name in adapting more inner peace lifestyles, from minimalism to the art of believing ‘you can do it’ attitude, which sounds identical to my sense when I write this tutorials. So I would like to tutor you from ‘magically’ making an animation introducing her philosophy, turn a very abstract things into visual.

Here’s a fast script I write in 5 minutes to understand how the AI process of the animation maker works my animation. You can probably copy mine to have a mock go.

Kondo Marie was interested in tidying up when she was five. At the age of 15, she began taking the chores very seriously. She read any available magazines and covered all books in the fields. One of her most faithful was ‘the art of giving up’ stating only keep the goods that matters to you and throw away unused, unnecessary. She adapted many solutions as suggested in the books, but her room was still messy over a time. In high school, she tidied up madly not only her rooms, but other family members’, even did schedule to living room, kitchen, etc. She threw away many things and realized, tidying up must be treated as a special event and not to schedule. Now she has been the specialist and helps many house to become a truly home and brings change to a lot of lives.

Here are some principles of her:

✔️Imagine Your Ideal Life✔️ Focused on Discarding Items first✔️Categorize and Arrange Later✔️Tidying is Not a job for routine✔️Tidy is a special event, need to be done All at Once✔️Tidying is not About Storage✔️Tidy by Category, Not Location✔️Forever Folding✔️Be Grateful to Your Belongings and Home

1. 3D quick animation – Renderforest

You can get a quick 3d like animation using Renderforest. The outcome is quite amazing, as the process happens fastly and I get what I want, of course with an unwanted logo from Renderforest. I highly recommend you to give this a nice try!

Firstly, I sign up, of course.

Secondly, I choose: 3D explainer video. – Create Now

Thirdly, I add my script and have my KonMari character generated, as well as the story are all auto done.

Here is my final product:

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2. 2D quick animation – Powtoon

I pick Powtoon for 2D character animations. There are a lot of customizations (maybe x5 more than others) and they will inspire you. Here are the steps:

I find this version suits my purpose to visualize Marie most. ‘t it stunning?

View it here:

3. Whiteboard animation – Moovly

I use Moovly for this Whiteboard animation, the most prevalent kind of animation that is loved by a massive demography. Have you ever read our case study for iCarebetter? Medical is one of the toughest part, but simplified and interesting with a few motions and a drawing hand. I expect this free tool could turn out a captivating one for you.

In Moovly, sign up and go to your dashboard, it’s alike to Camtasia, so, here’s I change the font, replace with my content. Bling! And it’s done.

Step 3 (Optional). Record a very short video of your own:

Although it’s very optional, believe me, it’s more appealing and way more tailoring if you send opening/ summarizing messages from a less formal form. It would draw huge attention from the learner because it’s likely to be an encore if in a liveshow, or the dessert, for you to feel grateful, personalized, while increasing engagement. How to do it?

It’s ideal if you have a tripod, standing in a different background than your common environment (which usually be your rooms, or background), in a tranquil place full of natural light

It’s still interesting if you hold a selfie camera, as long as you’re comfortable and ready to transfer your vibrant energies to the learners.

The content may be a short introduction to open up on the topic, or trigger them by a very interesting fact to their imagination, very dependable on your sense.

Remember don’t record in place too noisy with interrupting sounds or too long which would conversely counterproductive and bother the eyes of the listeners.

As a narrator to the lessons, you define and supple yourself as a main story teller, by far proving your preparation and investment yet creative atmosphere for the classroom.

‘Viral-log yourself’ | Illustration from Unsplash

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Step 4. Composite ‘Render’:

You should merge your animation with self record using free Merge video tools, here I suggest using Clideo into a perfect composition. You arrange the sequence to the right order and render it. You’re done now!

Step 5. How to remove the logo?

We can’t remove the logo using the above online software, it’s the cost for free. But in the future, in a slower way, you could simply learn Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro for the above steps with millions of video guides floating on design channels.

In a nutshell

Basically, this is all for a quick guide to turn your slide into animations using free animation tools.

For personal use, I think it’s reasonable to accept that free tools have their shortcomings: unremovable logos, marketing videos, limited character sources, some are not allowed to download (you just can publish to Youtube or Vimeo). However, do you agree with me that it’s fun and creative enough to produce an animation using free online resources? If you’re in, your students will be in and enough surprised, too! It does not take long as one expects and is not hard to accomplish as one may imagine. It’s the best combination to leverage the attention during video conference learning sessions.

In an organizational or institutional scale, I suggest starting the premium paid plan, or, hiring a professional animator, or, at the optimal choice, contract an animation vendor, you cannot go for an educational animation using a third party logo, streaming your material unauthorized. To go far, go with animation vendors, you will receive benefits from partnership pricing, consultance, and give feedback without knowing any software. It’s our pleasure to have you as one of F. Learning Studio’s core partners, it’s our enthusiasm in education differentiates and anchors us. F. Learning Studio provides free consultations on every step to make your education great again, don’t worry with script writing or choosing an appropriate styleframe, or getting motion-moving, we have a team of professionals and animation specialists after you!